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Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

Medium is doing a great job on the web design front already! Reading on my laptop, there was a fixed header taking up about 10-15% of my screen height (in fullscreen), a fixed social networking sidebar on the left and a lovely dialog box attached to the bottom of the screen letting me know I can subscribe to Medium for $5/month. Best part about that bottom bar is that just in case I haven't subscribed when I closed it out, it is more than happy to show up after a few minutes when I've switched back to the tab, as it did while I was composing this commentary.

Really helps the readability of the website, which I especially appreciate on a website devoted entirely to reading. Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this!

Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.

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It’s impossible to read any article regarding web design on Medium without having to seriously question whether it’s intended to be satire or not.

This.. “Don’t know anything about web development at all? Don’t worry you can just take a week long bootcamp! Already a web developer? Buy the C programming language book here and get out while you still can.”

The article in this post is clearly satire.

Ha! Satire aside:

With high quality open source publishing tools like Hugo[1] and Ghost[2], and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish.

Even using a paid service like Squarespace would be a step up in my opinion.

[1] https://gohugo.io/ [2] https://ghost.org/

> and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish

Seems like satire has settled in for the duration.

what's the problem with GitHub pages?

I'm amused to see GitHub thought of as self-publishing. It is nothing of the kind. It's someone else's platform granting you an instantly revocable right to use their facilities, no - or just a few thousand - strings attached. In principle no different from Facebook and Twitter and all the other shoddy complimentary crap.

It's different in that I am the customer, I literally give them money to host my stuff. They can of course stop hosting my stuff at any time, but then I will also stop giving them money.

I'm not 100% sure since I'm a developer and not an entrepreneur, but I think they prefer to receive money rather than not receive money.

For you, yes. If you look up at the ancestor posts you'll see the discussion was about free hosting at GitHub/gitlab.

This seems to be a silly distinction because I doubt you will find many sites which pass your bar for being self-published. Unless you bought your own hardware, host it on land you own, connect to the internet via your ISP, and call it something under your TLD there are still a lot of people who can revoke your access to the internet arbitrarily and have terms of service. Nobody is an island.

With GitHub you can use your own domain and have full access to the code. GitHub revokes or kicks you off? Just upload the code somewhere else and point your domain there. That's not the same situation as publishing on Medium.

Gathering an audience is way harder without Medium. It might be atrocious in other ways, but it vastly increases the chances of your content getting read.

Does it really tho? This one seemingly got featured by someone at Medium and it pulled in around 10 000 hits from newsletters. While it's more than nothing its no where near the majority source of my traffic.

On principle I'll avoid viewing an article if it's being hosted on medium and skim the comments to decide whether it's worth viewing directly. Probably go on to view the original about 1% of the time. Sorry author, but using medium already counts against you.

And what's with all these sites that now force you to accept their cookie policy? Totally pointless when you configure the browser to delete cookies when the browser exits...

Medium is not doing any type of good job. Going on the website, i'm immediately flooded with a layout of pictures and headlines designed to gain my attention. Clicking on an article, I get two notifications that pop-up regarding their privacy policy and then their premium service. Their entire schtick is designed to distract you and keep you on their site for as long as possible, as part of a scheme to monetize as much out of every visitor. For a much better design, check out something like instapaper or it's competitors.

I know people say that sarcasm is hard to pick up in text form, but I didn't think it was that tough.

Read the comments to the article on medium.

Fortunately, the comments are only accessible to members of that particular blog. Open commentary is so 2015.

My friend, my comrade in arms, your technological taste and superior sensibilities are second to none.

The comment you're responding to was sarcastic/satirical.

Yup. I like to hold my phone landscape. The overlays reduced the viewing area to a single line of text. Closed the tab.

`Clean Up` bookmarklet is your friend:

    javascript:(function(){(function(){var%20i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body%20*');for(i=0;i<elements.length;i++){var%20p=getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position;if(p==='fixed'||p==='sticky'||p==='-webkit-sticky'){elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})()})()

This is great, thank you.

Refactored to be shorter and more modern:

    javascript:Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('body *')).filter(tag => ['fixed', 'sticky', '-webkit-sticky'].some(prop => window.getComputedStyle(tag).position === prop)).forEach(tag => tag.parentNode.removeChild(tag))

Even more shorter and modern :)

    javascript:(() => document.body.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(el => { if (['fixed', 'sticky', '-webkit-sticky'].includes(getComputedStyle(el).position)) { el.remove() }))()

Did you try Make Medium Readable again ?

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16516126

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-medium-r...

Firefox has a reader mode. I use that for websites with terrible designs that are ostensibly made with the idea I would read them, but seem to have a completely different goal the poor writers on the other end are not clued in on.

Add-ons designed to "fix" a specific website are to be considered harmful. If a website can't respect its readership, an add-on isn't going to fix their attitude. To be clear this isn't a choice of otherwise equal trade-offs and which you make are a matter of taste. The types of sites described within the original article, the type of page I described upon loading Medium for the first time in probably a couple of months, and the behaviors described in the comments from the people that replied to my post are blatantly disrespectful to their readers.

For writers who feel stuck on Medium given it's recent downward trajectory, I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost

This screenshot of Medium is on a 1080p monitor at 100% scaling: https://imgur.com/a/gMa8dQT

Almost half the view space is Medium surrounding the article with whatever intentions they want to push on readers.

I publish all of my posts directly on my site (static site with Jekyll) but I used to republish most of them on Medium, but as of a few months ago I pulled all of them off Medium. Medium really doesn't do anything for you unless you use them as their primary platform and YOU drive traffic to the articles, in which case, you might as well just use your own platform.

Stylus[1] (permanently removing all the fixed elements) and Firefox reader mode are the only things that make Medium bearable. Static site generators are the way to go.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

In a mobile browser, they also obscure the article text with an "Open in app" button that stays on screen as you scroll.

> Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this!

Perhaps someone will make a 'medium' plugin for FF to make the plain reader mode behave more like medium? ;)

Reader mode is about:reader, which is protected from modifications by extensions. (This annoys me, because I’d like an actual black on white theme in reader mode, and I can’t do that without, if I recall correctly, userContent.css modifications, which you can’t do on mobile.)

Check out the ff plugin Dark background an light text

On Android: turn on reader mode, press the Aa button in the bottom right, press Light. The page is displayed with black text on white background.

Whoops, I meant white on black, which is much better than light grey on dark grey, on devices like OLED displays. Sigh.

That's the default for me, or touch Dark in that screen.

Ah, I zoomed in and saw it: the text is not white, it's light gray.

#eee on #333 is a long way off #fff on #000.

Yep. I used to have a Samsung SG2 with AMOLED and I hated grayish backgrounds in dark rooms at night: they emit light and hurt eyes when a pure black one doesn't emit any. Luckily my ebook reader of choice (Cool Reader) let me set the colors for day and night modes.

its so great they run a freemium model with amateur writers

^/s

I think their fixed header is way too big, even on my monitor.

> Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.

Medium has not made that obsolete at all, and you sound like a shill. Encouraging people to host their own websites leads to a more free future. Search, networking and analytics can be done on top of that layer. Strong network coherence is why social networks currently exist as centralized services, but it's a bandaid that patches an unsolved problem.

Pretty sure it was satire

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